Nagasaki questions Japan's nuclear policies

By Takehiko Kambayashi Aug 9, 2011, 7:35 GMT

Tokyo - As Japan marked the 66th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki Tuesday, the city's mayor asked why Japan has to go through another radioactive fallout crisis.

The 1945 bombing, the second in the closing days of World War II, killed 74,000 and injured about the same number in the southern Japanese city, which had a population at the time of 240,000.

Tens of thousands of people also died instantly in the first bombing in Hiroshima three days before.

Sixty-six years after those nuclear horrors, Japan is now facing its worst atomic accident.

'We were astounded by the severity of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station,' which was triggered by a magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami on March 11, Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue said.

The plant has leaked radioactive material into the environment ever since. Tens of thousands of residents have been forced to leave the areas.

'How has it come that we are threatened once again by the fear of radiation?' Taue asked.

'Have we lost our awe of nature? Have we become overconfident in the control we wield as human beings? Have we turned away from our responsibility for the future?'

Anti-nuclear activists in Hiroshima and Nagasaki conceded that they had failed to alert the country about nuclear dangers.

In the city of Fukushima, 60 kilometres north-west of the damaged plant, Koichi Kawano, a Nagasaki atomic-bomb survivor, said, 'We have opposed nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants under the slogan 'Human beings and atomic power cannot coexist.''

But 'we failed to make enough efforts to prevent the accident,' Kawano, who leads the Japan Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, said at the start of its annual meeting in late July.

Critics have long opposed nuclear power plants on the quake-prone country. But their voice had drawn little attention, they said.

'Some people overseas would think it is out of question for such a tiny island nation to have as many as 54 nuclear reactors,' said Sunao Tsuboi, chairman of the Japan Confederation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Sufferers Organizations.

Tsuboi was blown more than 10 metres sideways in the 1945 explosion in Hiroshima. His experience as a survivor of the world's first nuclear attack moved him to become one of the nation's leading anti-nuclear activists.

Japan has placed priority on economic benefit rather than on human life since the end of World War II, Tsuboi said. 'But, you know, we can live a happy life without nuclear plants.'

Even many anti-nuclear activists had not raised their voices against commercial nuclear power as people in general had believed the advancement of science and technology could bring peace and prosperity to resource-poor Japan, said Haruko Moritaki, executive director of the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons' Hiroshima office.

'We had not been able to hold a thorough discussion on the so-called peaceful use of nuclear energy,' he said.

But overseas, Moritaki said Japanese anti-nuclear activists like her sometimes face harsh criticism as Japan has long been under the US nuclear umbrella and depends on nuclear energy.

She said the crisis at the Fukushima plant has made more young people aware of the danger of nuclear energy. When activists held an anti-nuclear power rally in late April in Hiroshima, she saw many more young parents actively join the protest.

Moritaki, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, said she is concerned about residents in Fukushima and neighbouring regions as cancer began to increase in Hiroshima 10 to 15 years after the 1945 bombing.

Tsuboi echoed her concerns.

'I would also like to help save people in Fukushima,' the 86-year-old activist said.